1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a control device that controls a substrate processing apparatus according to a recipe and a control program therefor.
2. Description of the Related Art
A substrate processing system has been known to subject a substrate to desired processes such as deposition and etching. The processes are performed by the substrate processing system that is controlled by a control device according to a recipe (hereafter referred to as a process recipe) for processing the substrate (see, for example, JP Publication No. H9-129529). The process recipe used for the substrate processing includes time series data of process conditions for processing the substrate (such as temperature, gas flow rate, and RF output). One product process may require one process recipe.
Conventional hardware performance allows only a single process to be performed by one substrate processing system. Only a single process recipe has thus been available for one substrate processing system. The inside of the substrate processing apparatus is usually optimally conditioned before the substrate processing according to another recipe (hereafter referred to as a pre-recipe). Similar to the process recipe, only a single pre-recipe has been available for one substrate processing apparatus.
Recent advancement of the hardware performance, however, allows several types of processes to be performed by one substrate processing apparatus. The deposition system may combine, for example, the conventional chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process and the atomic layer deposition (ALD) process. The ALD switches the supplies of the several types of source gases as appropriate to control reactions of the gases before their reaching the substrate. The ALD may thus alternately supply each type of source gas to the substrate, thereby forming a set of very thin layers on the substrate at a lower process temperature than the conventional deposition processes. Specifically, the process recipe includes a set temperature as high as approximately 650 C for the conventional deposition processes and as low as approximately 450 C for the ALD deposition process.
Previous experiments on various processes show that when the process recipe has a set temperature largely different for different process types, it may be required that the data in the pre-recipe such as the gas flow rate and the RF output be set again, for each process type, to an optimum value not corresponding to the change in the set temperature of the process recipe. The data in the pre-recipe may thus be optimized for each process. The inside of the substrate processing apparatus may therefore be optimally conditioned for each process before the substrate processing, thereby subjecting the substrate to the optimum processing.
However, different types of processes performed by the substrate processing apparatus may require the operator to manually register the data of the pre-recipe to an optimum value for each type of process. The registration will take a long time and be very inefficient. Further, a typing error during the registration may cause the substrate processing apparatus to be controlled according to the recipe including the error. No optimum process result may thus be provided, or no good plasma processing may be applied to the substrate. It may be preferable to construct a control device that automatically controls the substrate processing apparatus in a way that the control device may flexibly correspond to a hardware advance in the future. The control device may thus effectively increase the commercial value of the expensive substrate processing system.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a control device that flexibly controls a substrate processing apparatus for various processes and a control program therefor.